"Your great-grandfather Davis came from Wales when he was just eleven years old," my mother told me when I was a child. But as an adult, many years later, I still had no idea where in Wales he came from–or if the story was even true.

The Davis family Bible in my possession identified my great-grandfather as William Davis, born 18 January 1839. It also noted that he was "born in Wales [and] came to America at the age of eleven years." The handwriting was my grandmother’s, so I knew this was not a contemporary record, but rather a record of family legend.

Without anything further, I didn’t know how to trace the early movements of the family in this country, let alone in Wales. Then the phone call came, and it opened the floodgates. A cousin in Texas, whom I hadn’t seen in more than forty years, had become interested in genealogy and wanted to know if I had done any research into our family. We talked for hours and began exchanging letters. One of her first letters came with a copy of a page from her mother’s Bible. It not only identified William as our great-grandfather, but also named two of his siblings, John and Mary Ann. Amazingly, it also provided the names of their parents: Miles Davis and Ann Thomas. Now I had the names of two adults to trace locally.

Very quickly, though, my excitement turned to puzzlement. I recognized Miles as an unusual name and expected that it would make my search easier. But there were no records anywhere of a Miles or Ann Davis. I did learn that the Davis family ended up in a small community in Summit County, Ohio named Tallmadge, so I decided to read every record I could get my hands on from Tallmadge.

Fortunately, our local public library had a good collection of local history records on microfilm. I began by reading the minutes of the Tallmadge Historical Society, which was founded in 1858 and is the oldest historical society in Ohio. While I found several references to William as an adult, I couldn’t find information that would lead me to a specific location in Wales.

I then turned to the 1850 census. I already knew there was no Miles Davis in the index, but I had found a couple of references to the name William. Maybe the parents had died, and I’d find William as a child with another family. It was worth the effort to scan the faded microfilm. The second William I checked turned out to be an eleven-year-old boy living with a much older couple named John and Rachel Thomas. Along with him were two other children: a John Davis, age thirteen, and a Mary Ann Davis, age four. These were the siblings from my cousin’s Bible! But who were John and Rachel Thomas, and what happened to the children’s parents?

My first guarded assumption was that John and Rachel might be the parents of the children’s mother, Ann Thomas Davis. Their ages were right, and it would help explain what the children were doing with them in 1850.

I decided to share my limited findings with the genealogical librarian at the local library. When she heard about the connection to Tallmadge, she told me of the Lawrence Collection at the branch library in Tallmadge. Frank E. Lawrence had been a local newspaperman and a devoted collector of local history. When he died, he left his collection of notes, records, mementos, and photographs to the library. Accompanied by a librarian, the public could access the treasure trove. The librarian and I made an appointment for the next week.

The Lawrence Collection proved to be a gold mine. Even our librarian was amazed at the amount of material I gleaned during the several days I pored over the boxes. When I got home from one of those marathon sessions, I glanced over a note I had written while searching the Lawrence Collection: a son of John and Rachel Thomas, who had also come to Tallmadge, had been born in a place called Pontypool, Wales. What if their daughter Ann was born there, too? It was a lead I planned to check into.

At about the same time, my mother’s sister and I were talking about my research into my father’s family. My aunt said, "You know your dad was related to Metta Point, don’t you?" While I recognized the name, I didn’t know where I had heard it. After admitting my ignorance, I was reminded that Metta Point had been my mother’s teacher and had lived across the street from her family after marrying. Metta, it turned out, was the granddaughter of Mary Ann Davis, my great-grandfather’s sister. Her daughter, Jean, still lived in the area.

I located Jean in the phone book and contacted her. She sent a letter recounting a family legend I had never heard–a legend that ultimately led to the truths I was seeking. According to her mother, four-year-old Mary Ann Davis had been "stolen" from her drunken father by her aunts and uncles and brought to America. Apparently, after the girl’s mother died, her father turned to alcohol, and the rest of the family questioned his ability to care for his daughter. Further embellishments had the father running down the pier, yelling for his little girl as the ship sailed away.

While the story was a compelling one, I had some concerns about it. It made no mention of Mary Ann’s brothers nor the grandparents I believed I had found. Further, it placed Mary Ann and her dramatic escape from Great Britain in 1851, and I had just found her in the 1850 U.S. census record. Obviously, I had more researching to do.

At the time, I was reading Welsh Family History: A Guide to Research edited by John Rowlands, and I recalled the chapter on family history societies. I decided to locate Pontypool and contact the family history society in whatever county it was located. After checking a good map, I determined that Pontypool was located in the present county of Gwent. I also learned that, at the time of my great-grandfather’s birth, this area was known as Mon-mounthshire.

I sent a letter to the Gwent Family History Society, detailing my desire to learn more about my family, my tenuous belief that they may have come from Pontypool, and my interest in joining the society. Almost as an afterthought, I suggested that since many Welshmen had settled in my area of Ohio because of its coal mining industry, I might be able to help some of the society members trace their families here.

In response, I not only received the membership information and a welcoming letter from the society secretary, but I was also put in touch with a member who was interested in having me do research for her. In exchange, she was willing to try to trace my family in Pontypool.

I was able to help her locate references in Ohio; my contributions, however, could not match what she sent me. First, she located a baptismal record for Ann Thomas that identified her as the daughter of John and Rachel Thomas–my hunches were correct. Further digging uncovered the names of Miles’ parents, as well as several of his siblings. She also found local parish records containing the entries for the reading of the banns and subsequent marriage of Ann Thomas and Miles Davies. (I now had the original spelling of the surname.)

Despite her best efforts, though, she found no mention of the children, although she did locate a death record for Ann, who died of typhoid fever in 1846 at the age of twenty-nine.

As is probably true of all genealogists, I harbored a thinly veiled hope that one day I would be able to find a living relative. When I shared this with my Welsh friend, she suggested that I write to the local newspapers and ask anyone who might be descended from known family members to contact me.

This is how I connected with Mike Davies. As near as we can tell, Mike and I are not related, but we have become closer than most true cousins. He is a tireless researcher, full of wonderful stories of the area where my father’s family lived, worked, and died. For more than two years, he helped me trace four generations of the Davies family in Wales. It now appears that my great-grandfather and his brother and sister were the only Davies family members to come to America.

While we haven’t found the right passenger list to support it, we believe the three children left Pontypool with their maternal grandparents sometime after the death of their mother. The legend of the kidnapping may or may not be true. Their father remained in Wales, later remarried, fathered another son, and died at the age of eighty-seven in the Griffithstown Workhouse–some fifty-one years after his three children left for America. There is no indication either here or in Wales that the children of his first marriage communicated with their father again.

Birth records have been located for William and Mary Ann, but their brother John was born just before such record keeping became standard. Death records for Miles, his second wife, and their son have also been found, along with those for each of his parents. Most of Miles’ siblings have been traced as well.

Through this research experience, I have had the privilege of getting to know the town of Pontypool and its people through the loving eyes of my good friend Mike. He sent me books on local history and novels that reflect the conditions and time when my great-grandfather’s family was struggling to survive. Either with tongue-in-cheek or with great passion, he provided lengthy discourses on the proud history and beauty of this land of my fathers.

As I look back on the adventure now, I realize that without having a definite plan to do so, I relied on many of the resources beginning genealogists are encouraged to consult. I listened to family legend, searched family Bibles, and made contact with "distant cousins"–all of which were steps that provided basic information for my research.

Then I made a careful search through census records, which supplied the material for my first leap-of-faith assumptions. The local librarian was able to put me in touch with an archival collection I hadn’t known existed, thus supplying further clues to be explored.

During that time, I continued to read good research materials that suggested locating and joining a family history society in my family’s home county. Once I did that, the society supplied not only new information, but also provided suggestions for furthering my knowledge–including writing a letter to the local newspapers. Finally, the letter to the newspaper connected me not to the contemporary family members I had originally hoped for, but to an avid researcher who took on my cause as his own.

Recently, my son and I went home to Wales. We walked the streets our family walked 150 years ago, and we visited the parish church and graveyard that have ties to so many family members. Our new friend, Mike, arranged a tour of the last working coal mine in the area, where we learned about the conditions facing the men, women, and children who worked in the mines during the last century.

We heard the music of the language, both spoken and sung, and tromped over the rolling mountains of the area. We also sat in the locals (neighborhood pubs) and eavesdropped a bit on stories of the place and its people. Perhaps it was then that we began to truly understand what my great-grandfather Davis might have felt as he "came from Wales when he was just eleven years old."

Judy Anne Davis, a retired high school English teacher, has been researching her family for the past fifteen years.

Return to the Ancestry Magazine January/February 2001 Table of Contents.